The RHEAL project aims to integrate traditional, spiritual, and biomedical approaches to mental health care. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and bringing together scholars, postgraduate students and practitioners from 13 institutions spanning from South America to Europe, Tanzania, South-East and East-Asia, it encourages collaboration among researchers, clinicians, and individuals with lived experiences to develop person-centered, inclusive mental health models. Utilizing diverse methodologies, RHEAL fosters dialogue and promotes sustainable healing practices.
Rethinking mental health through healing cooperation
Mental health care often overlooks the value of traditional, spiritual and lived experiences. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the RHEAL project aims to bridge the gap between biomedical and religious or traditional healing practices by fostering dialogue between researchers, clinicians, spiritual healers and people with lived experience of mental health conditions. Focusing on trance and possession practices, RHEAL combines anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and creative arts to explore how diverse approaches can meaningfully collaborate. Through ethnography, participatory video, and sensory methods, the project captures healing as a lived, embodied experience. The goal is to develop inclusive, person-centred models for mental health care and shape sustainable, culturally sensitive policies grounded in cooperation and mutual understanding.
Objectives
RHEAL investigates innovative interdisciplinary methodologies for fostering collaboration between researchers, healthcare professionals, religious and traditional healers, people with lived experience of mental health conditions, and their carers. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary approaches of anthropology, creative arts, sociology, psychology, and psychiatry, RHEAL addresses pressing issues in mental health by investigating how different therapeutic approaches can better communicate to improve care and knowledge exchange. Focussing on mental health and practices of spiritual trance and possession, this project aims to bridge the epistemological divide between biomedical and religious/spiritual and traditional perspectives, identifying best practices for cooperation in healing. In order to achieve this scientific breakthrough, RHEAL draws upon the methodologies of ethnography, micro-phenomenology, and creative participatory approaches to develop co-designed, person-centred knowledge transfer models. Visual arts and multimodal approaches – including participatory video, photography, and sensory engagement – are used to access lived and embodied experiences of healing, in order to rethink the production of knowledge about healing cooperation through the sensorial engagement in everyday life with materialities and images, and encourage inclusive, sustainable and collaborative policies. In bringing together the fields of humanities, life and social sciences, RHEAL aims to create an interdisciplinary, applied methodological toolkit for mental healthcare research and practice. By advancing innovative practices of healing cooperation, it seeks to inform sustainable healthcare policies and contribute to the global discourse on integrative healing. By ‘sustainability’, RHEAL intends to work towards systems that are inclusive of the person’s experiences and traditional knowledge, and able to accommodate side by side different epistemologies and therapeutic approaches.
WP 3- Ethics and visual and multi-modal methodologies (Lead Prof. Colucci)
In addition to being the team leader for the Middlesex University Visual and Creative Methods Research Group that she involved in the consortium, Prof. Colucci is the lead of the Working Package 3
Outputs from this WP and other activities where Prof. Colucci is involved will be posted here and through the blog you can subscribe to here
For more info about RHEAL please check https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101236435
